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Seminar on Habermas & His Critics

This semester I am teaching a graduate seminar on Habermas & His Critics. Putting the syllabus together was quite a feat, and so I want to share it with my dear readers. Feel free to offer ideas for the next time I teach this. And also feel free to borrow liberally for your own teaching.

Phil 571R – 000: HABERMAS & HIS CRITICS

Fall 2014

McAfee, Tu 2:00PM – 5:00PM

Office Hours: Bowden Hall 302, MW 10-noon and by appointment

nmcafee@emory.edu

Content:

Jürgen Habermas is easily one of the most important and influential philosophers of the past half century. The most prominent member of the second generation of Frankfurt School critical theory, he has made huge strides in contemporary intellectual thought. At the same time, Habermas may be as controversial as he is famous. A self-professed intellectual continuing “the project of the Enlightenment,” he has raised the ire of many contemporary philosophers who would just as soon dispense with the Enlightenment. Despite his critics, Habermas’s work has been enormously influential and helpful in democratic theory, the social sciences, globalization studies, aesthetics, epistemology, and philosophy of language. The purpose of this graduate seminar is two-fold: (1) to provide an opportunity to develop a comprehensive view of his work and (2) to examine how this work has touched off controversies with his contemporaries and how these controversies have been met (sometimes with an apology).

Texts:

Barker, McAfee, and McIvor, eds. Democratizing Deliberation.

Dussel, Enrique Dussel: Ethics of Liberation: In the Age of Globalization and Exclusion, Duke 2013. Available as an electronic book through Emory Library’s DiscoverE catalog.